Migrant Crisis: Sweden registers record number of 10,201 weekly asylum claims

MOSCOW. KAZINFORM At least 10,201 refugees applied for asylum in Sweden last week, making it the highest number of migrants to apply for asylum in the Nordic nation in a seven-day period, the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) reported Monday. According to Migrationsverket, this latest inflow of migrants includes 4,333 people from Afghanistan, 2,719 Syrians and 1,405 Iraqi refugees. The remaining 1,744 asylum seekers came from other states.

Unaccompanied minors accounted for over a quarter of the group - 2,827 - which is also a new weekly record figure. Over 80 percent of these children are from Afghanistan.

Earlier in November, Sweden's Minister for Migration Morgan Johansson said that the number of asylum seekers was increasing faster than the number of accommodation places, meaning that there were no guarantees anymore that they would be able to accommodate everyone.

According to Migrationsverket, Sweden expects up to 190,000 refugees to arrive in the country by the end of 2015. The European Union is currently struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa for Europe. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), over 770,000 refugees from these regions have arrived in Europe via the Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of 2015.